The Contemporary Percussionist

General Info

Year: 1986
Duration: 1st Edition
Difficulty: Intermediate to Advanced
Publisher: Meredith Music
Cost: $18.95

Description

The Contemporary Percussionist by Michael Udow and Chris Watts is a guidebook to help students familiarize themselves with multi-percussion setups/music in general, and Udow's method of notation (which has been adopted by many composers) in particular.

Inside you'll find twenty solos of increasing complexity to help become familiar with playing multi-percussion pieces - which will also help any percussionist deal with the fact that we're often asked to play a dozen (or more) instruments at a time in any setting.

Movements

Instrumentation

Reviews

Organization: There is no table of contents present with the order of the book starting with a foreword then acknowledgment, instrument selection, instrument set-up, mallet selection, stick control, then etudes. The back cover of the book lists other publications by the publisher, with no information about the authors to be found.

Contents: The instrument selection and instrument set-up sections heavily rely on an organizational system of timbre and decay in relation to the instruments instead of a more traditional classification by playing type (idiophones, membranophones, etc.). Mallet selection and stick control focus more on how the player interacts with these instruments. Each etude contains notes, as well as how the set-up should appear and what instruments and mallets are to be used.

Uses: This book could be used to source interesting solos for percussionists, perhaps at the high school level but will most likely see use in a college setting or perhaps for performing percussionists. This book can allow musicians to explore how they approach multiple percussion works and in turn, how to approach the music.

Rating: I feel this book plays an interesting role, in that it is not written specifically for repertoire but as a way for percussionists to see how multiple percussion works are organized and crafted or how many different ways they can be played. These pieces are not meant to develop any techniques for playing these types of pieces but are more meant for the player to see how they can organize different sounds and instruments into a playable set-up. 5/5. User:Hondogracias

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References